Today's Mudline

March 3, 2015

South Dakota state Sen. Isaac Latterell on Planned Parenthood: "Worse than ISIS."....Keith Olbermann on Penn State students: "Pitiful."....Bill O'Reilly on David Corn: "A left-wing assassin...A guttersnipe liar...I expect [him] to be in the kill zone. Where he deserves to be."....Corn on O'Reilly: "It's impossible to win a debate with O'Reilly because he is not bound by reality."....Rudy Giuliani: "I don't believe the president loves America. He doesn't love you. He doesn't love me."....NY Daily News on Giuliani: "Loves America. But apparently he hates Barack Obama even more."....David Axelrod on Giuliani: "A fading politician, kind of lighting himself on fire and trying to get some attention."....Sally Kohn on Giuliani remarks: "Narrow-minded, ugly and just plain offensive."....Hannibal Buress on fans: "Stop calling me your f***ing spirit animal."....

Daily Briefing

Deep buzz for the content-deprived

Every weekday, while you get showered and dressed, we pluck these dewy-
fresh, breaking stories from the info-clogged byways of the datasphere.
Pour yourself a cup of coffee and stoke up on everything you need to know,
or at least enough to fake it.

Humans are a daydreaming species. According to a recent study led by the Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew A. Killingsworth, people let their minds wander forty-seven per cent of the time they are awake. (The scientists demonstrated this by developing an iPhone app that contacted twenty-two hundred and fifty volunteers at random intervals during the day.) In fact, the only activity during which we report that our minds are not constantly wandering is “love making.” We’re able to focus for that...

The official position of China’s rulers is that the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 3-4, 1989, is not open for discussion: a student-led “counter-revolutionary rebellion” was put down by security forces. Case closed.

Yet, for an event so thoroughly airbrushed out of view, there was plenty of activity on its 23rd anniversary this week. A candlelight vigil in Hong Kong drew tens of thousands of people, one of the largest gatherings in that city since 1989. Authorities in a Beijing district posted stringent security precautions calling for “wartime systems and protective measures.” When the Shanghai stock market fell 64.89 points Monday — which some Chinese interpreted as an eerie reference to the date of the massacre — censors went into overdrive trying to wipe out any references to it on popular micro­blogs...

In Madrid you see them on the streets, jobless, aimless, often bearing college degrees but working as cabbies, baristas, street performers, or—more often—not at all. In Spain as in Greece, nearly half of the adults under 25 don’t work. Call them the screwed generation, the victims of expansive welfare states and the massive structural debt charged by their parents. In virtually every developed country, and increasingly in developing ones, they include not only the usual victims, the undereducated and recent immigrants, but also the college-educated...

Walter Cronkite's power was considerable and he used it for good. He flourished in the bargain and lived a heck of a life.

None of that will come as news to the world he so reliably informed, but it is carefully and colorfully laid out in "Cronkite" (Harper), the just-released biography by Douglas Brinkley.

The CBS Newsman emerges from its 667 pages in a form that will be fully recognizable to his viewers and admirers: as the intrepid newshound, the reassuring authority, the cultural colossus who called himself "a reluctant big shot," upon whom was thrust the unsought mantle of "most trusted man in America" and who never betrayed that public trust...

From the start, Jeff Bezos wanted to “get big fast.” He was never a “small is beautiful” kind of guy. The Brobdingnagian numbers tell much of the story. In 1994, four years after the first Internet browser was created, Bezos stumbled upon a startling statistic: the Internet had been growing at the rate of 2,300 percent annually. In 1995, the year Bezos, then 31, started Amazon, just 16 million people used the Internet. A year later, the number was 36 million, a figure that would multiply at a furious rate. Today, more than 1.7 billion people, or almost one out of every four humans on the planet, are online. Bezos understood two things...

Class sizes have increased, courses have been cut and tuition has been raised — repeatedly. Fewer colleges are offering summer classes. Administrators rely increasingly on higher tuition from out-of-staters. And there are signs it could get worse: If a tax increase proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown is not approved this year, officials say they will be forced to consider draconian cuts like eliminating entire schools or programs...

When Donald Trump hijacked the news this week with his latest birther ravings and Mitt Romney refused to repudiate him, Bob Inglis could only sigh.

“It really damages our credibility to not deal in facts,” the former South Carolina congressman told Salon. “The fact is the president is an American. The fact is the president is not a socialist. He’s left of center – he’s way left of me. But he’s not a socialist. There’s a difference.”...

Queuing theory is the study of lines. All kinds of lines. The lines at supermarket checkouts, the lines at toll booths, the lines of people on hold waiting for someone, anyone, to pick up at the cable company’s 1-800 number...